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From the album "Wheel of Heaven" by Chris Floyd & Nick Kulukundis.
Will You Be Free?
When the guns
No longer sound
When the dead
Are in the ground
When the foe
Hangs from the tree
Will you be free?
Will you be free?
When blood and iron
Rule the day
When ash and bone
Mix with the cla...

Divide and conquer, demonize and distract: how the bosses thwarted emancipation and set whites against blacks, keeping both poor while pocketing the loot. It's where we came from, and how we got where we are now -- neck-deep in the mire.
It must've been a morning
Like this one here
Hot sun a-dawnin...

It takes 14 seconds for the soul to burn.
The process begins with a synaptic firing,
igniting a network of celestial complexity,
meshing, near instantaneously, with hormonal flows
and multiple streams of sensory data
from the interface of the nervous system
with the world beyond.
The world within,...

Deep State is a Terror State, Torture State,
Tyrant State — and it’s OK with that.
Deep State was formed to bodyguard elites,
keeping their dominance ever-refreshed.
Deep State doesn’t care what you advocate,
just as long as you toe the unsaid line.
Deep State is cold, lacks true affect;
ha...

American taxpayers have inadvertently created a network of warlords across Afghanistan who are making millions of dollars escorting NATO convoys and operating outside the control of either the Afghan government or the American and NATO militaries, according to the results of a Congressional investigation released Monday.

"Inadvertently!" Really, what yocks!

Coincidentally, I am currently reading a new edition of Norman Stone's 1964 book, The Honoured Society, dealing with the great "surge" of Mafia power in Sicily in the post-WWII years. Stone, who was in Sicily at the time, tells an interesting story of how the American military government "inadvertently" restored the Mafia to feudal lordship over Sicily by "inadvertently" placing Mafia leaders and their associates in charge of towns and villages all over Sicily, "inadvertently" giving them carte blanche to create a vast black market, "inadvertently" allowing them to crush any movement toward land reform or unionized labor, and "inadvertently" putting the political process in their stranglehold, laying the foundation for generations of violence, terror, corruption, suffering and deprivation for ordinary people.

As Stone notes:

Don Caló received the loyalist cooperation in these [black market] manoeuvres from his friends in AMGOT [Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories], who supplied the passes necessary for his caravan of trucks to travel without impediment up and down the roads of Sicily. At about that time, AMGOT in Sicily had fallen under the sway of its unofficial adviser, Vito Genovese, an American gangster -- later named as head of the Mafia offshoot, Cosa Nostra -- who had disappeared after his indictment on a charge of murder and turned up in Italy. Don Caló found Genovese most accommodating. From AMGOT came all the petrol he required, and sometimes, when he was short of transport for an exceptionally large shipment, his friends helped out with a military vehicle or two.

In 1944 I happened to be in the town of Benevento through which Don Caló's black market caravans were obliged to pass on their way northward, and although at times there were more trucks loaded with Don Caló's [olive] oil on the roads of southern Italy than there were military vehicles, there was nothing to be done to put a stop to this situation. All papers were always in order.

And here we are again. From the NY Times' chuckle fest:

The 79-page report, entitled “Warlord Inc.,” paints an anarchic picture of contemporary Afghanistan, with the country’s major highways being controlled by groups of freelance gunmen who answer to no one — and who are being paid [billions of dollars] by the United States.

Afghanistan, the investigation found, plays host to hundreds of unregistered private security companies employing as many as 70,000 largely unsupervised gunmen. “The principal private security subcontractors,” the report said, “are warlords, strongmen, commanders and militia leaders who compete with the Afghan central government for power and authority."

...“Long after the United States leaves Afghanistan, and the convoy security business shuts down, these warlords will likely continue to play a major role as autonomous centers of political, economic and military power,” the report said.

Just like the "good war" way back when! Which is only fitting, for as we all know, the nine-year morass of loot and domination in Afghanistan is the "good war" of our latest Greatest Generation, now led by a wise and noble prince of progress and peace.

But here's something strange from the Times' story of the "inadvertent" program of warlord creation:

These subcontracts, the investigation found, are handed out without any oversight from the Department of Defense, despite clear instructions from Congress that the department provide such oversight.

Hmm; the Pentagon is deliberately ignoring clear instructions from Congress ... yet the result of this deliberate, knowing, wilful course of action is somehow "inadvertent." Yes, let's drag out the old courtroom trope once again, for, once again, it is all too apt: "Your honor, it's true that I picked up the gun, loaded the gun, pointed the gun, pulled the gun's trigger, and fired five shots into the head of the victim -- but the death itself was entirely inadvertent."

The Pentagon's creation of "a network of warlords" to do its donkey work -- and its dirty work -- in Afghanistan is no more "inadvertent" than the empowerment and entrenchment of the Mafia in Sicily in 1944, or the creation of a international network of armed Islamic extremists under the Carter and Reagan administrations, etc., etc., etc. Our imperial militarists are happy to empower ruthless thugs of every description to keep the Great Game of loot and domination going, without giving the slightest thought to the worthless rabble who will suffer the consequences -- sometimes for generations.

Gee, maybe it's not so funny after all.

UPDATE: If you want to know just why our masters and commanders are waging their profitable wars abroad and their relentless class wars at home, then check out Arthur Silber's latest. You'll find the answer there.